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Edward Allen Jun 2019
Restraint,
Shackles,
How blinding,
Words of sincere certainty,
And honest hopes unfounded,
To utter power,
Bound within my head,

Intoxicating, enchanting,
Electric, within tension,
Possibility and imagination,
Fluid beyond mention,
Hidden, insidious undertow,
Beneath kind, genuine intention,

How blurried, how quiet,
How secret, how afraid,
How sudden… in a moment,

Changed.
Crushed.
Removed.

Darkness and devastation.
The weight of despair.
Within a chasm of disbelief.

It all seems unreal,
Unhinged, unraveled
Undone, unwhole,

Pieces.
In a swirling tempest of dust,
Twisting, turning, overwhelming,
Broken, fading, lost.

Slowly… gravity… and time...
Patient grains of sand run dry,
Fears, disappointment, and doubt,
Tears, running down, and running out,

Searching for some feeling,
For something lost, long ago,
A speck of light, a star within,
A pulsing, rhythmic flow,

A new chance to look inside,
Revelation, in a blinding glare,
What once disappeared beyond notice,
Now an imminent state of repair.
This poem is written from the perspective of a person who has their heart unexpectedly broken. At the beginning of the poem the person sees that something isn't quite right... but they are enchanted with love and limerence, and they can't see the insidious warning signs. Then it hits, and they go through the stages of disbelief, grief, and ultimately begin renewal of the heart and soul.

Notice how the flow of the poem reflects the person's emotional state at each point. Initially when things are questionable, the words have a haphazard syllabic flow and rhyme scheme, so representing the dissonance between what the speaker hopes and wants the situation to be, versus a different reality. When things then go badly, the words become sharp and staccato. The rhyme scheme is non-existent, as everything is has gone wrong for the speaker. But then the words begin to flow a little more easily.  The rhyme scheme gains presence and sounds more pleasant. By the end, the speaker is finally seeing the silver lining of it all, and realizes it's time to heal.

Notice some of the wordplay, like "Electric, within tension", which can phonetically could also be "with intention" -- both applicable, and with subtle but important difference in meaning. There are also some double meanings, such as "To utter power", which can mean powerful words and also mean the subject has the utmost power over the speaker.

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